Friday, May 24, 2013

Their logo is that of a Centurion and they play in Kanata, not Ottawa.

Anyways, the lockout-shortened 2013 NHL campaign is being played under a big, fat asterisk.

In a matter of days, the worst-kept secret will be made official. The Kanata Centurions will be the opposition for the Vancouver Canucks at B.C. Place Stadium in the NHL’s Stadium Series of shinny gargantuan gimmick in 2014. An NHL advance crew was in B.C. Place earlier in May to plan logistics for the event, expected to draw up to 59,000. They even measured where the temporary rink will go on the synthetic turf surface.

Mayor Gregor Robertson was not interested in answering my questions about Ballem's spending when I saw him at the media-invited opening ceremony of the Society for Information Display convention on May 21 at the Vancouver Convention Centre. Robertson claimed he had to get to a tour of the convention floor and didn't have time to answer my lone question about Ballem's spending. Luckily, CKNW's Janet Brown cornered Robertson a day later, but his answers were a tad weak.

Then Bateman notched a hat-trick and a bonus marker over the expense reports of PavCo poobahs.

CEO Dana Hayden bills taxpayers $2,200 a month for her Vancouver accommodation and spent $50 on fuel to travel to Langley to meet with PavCo chair and Langley City Mayor Peter Fassbender (the Surrey-Fleetwood Liberal MLA-elect).

Crosley’s expenses include $115.65 on June 11, 2011 for maintenance at Morrey Nissan, $42.46 for tire repair for a Nissan Rogue on March 22, 2011 and $224.48 for tire purchase for a Nissan Rogue on March 26, 2011.

A $69.55 meal expense on March 25, 2011 shows Buckley lunched with John Christison of the Washington State Convention Centre. During the 1990s, Buckley and Christison were partners in a consultancy that was called, wait for it, Buckley-Christison. Buckley said he was invited to visit the Seattle Sounders and met Christison for a tour of his facility, and to discuss convention business and industry trends, “but certainly no connection to Buckley-Christison.”

“I never participated in the practice and earned no fees at all," Buckley once told me. "He did continue however to use my surname.”

In Vancouver, the Burrard Street Bridge will turn 81 years-old on July 1. The 1932-built concrete and steel bridge cost $3 million to build, but is visibly crumbling and rusting. A seismic upgrade program finished in 2006. Bike lanes were installed in 2009 at a cost of $1.3 million.

The Burrard Bridge's uncertain future was the focus of my Investigators segment on the Simi Sara Show on CKNW AM 980 on May 24. Unfortunately, neither city hall's chief engineer Peter Judd nor city hall spokeswoman Mairi Welman responded to my requests for comment.

In 2012, City of Vancouver paid almost $1.24 million to Associated Engineering to conduct a series of reports. More than 500 pages of were released to me via Freedom of Information, but almost 380 pages have been "greyed-out" -- withheld in their entirety, like the one on the right. City hall claims the reports contain advice that, if disclosed, could harm the city financially.

The minuscule amount of information that is visible claims the bridge is in fair or poor condition. While it does not indicate imminent danger, the lack of information disclosed raises important questions about whether it really is safe. The detailed report card on the bridge and cost estimates were censored. Why does Vision Vancouver want to hide information from you about such an important piece of the city's infrastructure?

The reports I received via FOI are linked below. Click on the titles and see for yourself. Notice all the censored pages. UPDATE (May 27): I found the following online about different bridges in different B.C. jurisdictions on Vancouver Island: Reports about the E&N Railway bridges and the Johnson Street Bridge. Perhaps City of Vancouver could learn a lesson about transparency from these documents. Meanwhile, the Ontario provincial government offers information about its bridges. Ontario proactively discloses a list of bridges that includes names, locations, condition rating, ages and most-recent year of inspection. B.C.'s government has a database, but, according to the Ministry of Transportation, is "very technical and wasn't designed as a public-facing website, but we are looking at ways we can provide information to the public."

Thursday, May 23, 2013

So-called smart meters were among the multitude of grievances British Columbians had with the ruling BC Liberals, who were surprisingly given another four years to govern on May 14 when not enough voters showed up at the polls to force a change.

So how did smart meters not become part of the election discourse? Premier Christy Clark and her Liberals set the agenda by pushing pipelines. The media became fascinated by polls. Adrian Dix and the NDP were too little, too late with criticism for the Liberals. Smart meters were part of the low-hanging fruit that the NDP ignored to their detriment. And BC Hydro exploited B.C.'s weak and poorly enforced Freedom of Information laws.

On Jan. 30, I made a request for information about the smart meter program's one-year completion delay. BC Hydro finally sent me the documents on May 15.

Expect a PavCo board shuffle soon. Chair Peter Fassbender was elected as a BC Liberal MLA in Surrey-Fleetwood in the May 14 election. He did not step aside while seeking political office, despite Board Resourcing and Development Office Conduct Principles. Director Suzanne Anton won election for the BC Liberals in Vancouver-Fraserview.

Meanwhile, National Hockey League staff planning the 2014 Stadium Series paid B.C. Place a scouting visit earlier this month. The official announcement is coming soon. The Vancouver Canucks are expected to host the Ottawa Senators in front of as many a 59,000 people next March.

After the government invoked a delay, I finally received some of the records from the Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training Ministry on May 13 -- the day before voting day. I reported on the documents on The World Today with Jon McComb on CKNW AM 980. I got some more documents from the Finance Ministry on May 17, three days after election day.

I have published those records below. I am disappointed to say that there are still more questions than answers. You will see that the government has withheld most of the information.

Below you will see a Financial Impact Assessment dated Oct. 9, 2012 and the Nov. 27, 2012 Treasury Board approval from Finance Minister Mike de Jong (who danced for the crowd of 35,000). Notice in de Jong's letter to Pat Bell that the funds came from contingencies. With four months remaining in the fiscal year, de Jong was already dipping into the rainy-day fund for non-essential spending. This is the same Finance Minister who claimed on Nov. 28 that he was controlling spending.

The contract with Times of India subsidiary BCCL International Events Private Ltd. was dated Dec. 12, 2012 and the government previously claimed it was worth $9.5 million, but there are no dollar values visible. Which begs the question: how much did this event really cost British Columbians?

In the contract, the government required BCCL to create an "online virtual data room" -- a glorified website -- containing records about its services. But the very next line in the contract says that any records held by BCCL are beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. This is a new trick that I hope Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham will deem illegal.

The government has the power to show you and me as much or as little as it wants. In this case, it chose secrecy. It conveniently chose to cloak this very expensive event behind the closed doors of cabinet because it knew this was not for the benefit of all. How can we believe the information contained in the government's propaganda?

For $9.5 million, how many more cops could have been investigating unsolved murders and rapes in B.C.? How many homeless people could have been housed? How many cancer patients could have been treated? How many more scientists could have been in labs, trying to solve diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's?